“And in his hand you saw an object. Is that correct?”
“Yeah, I thought I saw a gun in his hand.... What I seen was
an entire weapon. A square weapon in his hand. It looked to me
at that split second, after all the gunshots around me and the
gun smoke and Ed McMellon down, that he was holding a gun
and that he had just shot Ed and that I was next.”
Carroll and McMellon fired sixteen shots each: an entire
clip. Boss fired five shots. Murphy fired four shots. There was
silence. Guns drawn, they climbed the stairs and approached
Diallo. “I seen his right hand,” Boss said later. “It was out from
his body. His palm was open. And where there should have
been a gun, there was a wallet.... I said, ‘Where’s the fucking
gun?’ ”
Boss ran up the street toward Westchester Avenue because
he had lost track in the shouting and the shooting of where they
were. Later, when the ambulances arrived, he was so
distraught, he could not speak.
Carroll sat down on the steps, next to Diallo’s bullet-ridden
body, and started to cry.